TY  - GEN
A1  - Hartmann, Matthias
A1  - Mast, Fred W.
A1  - Fischer, Martin H.
T1  - Spatial biases during mental arithmetic
BT  - evidence from eye movements on a blank screen
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - While the influence of spatial-numerical associations in number categorization tasks has been well established, their role in mental arithmetic is less clear. It has been hypothesized that mental addition leads to rightward and upward shifts of spatial attention (along the "mental number line"), whereas subtraction leads to leftward and downward shifts. We addressed this hypothesis by analyzing spontaneous eye movements during mental arithmetic. Participants solved verbally presented arithmetic problems (e.g., 2 + 7, 8-3) aloud while looking at a blank screen. We found that eye movements reflected spatial biases in the ongoing mental operation: Gaze position shifted more upward when participants solved addition compared to subtraction problems, and the horizontal gaze position was partly determined by the magnitude of the operands. Interestingly, the difference between addition and subtraction trials was driven by the operator (plus vs. minus) but was not influenced by the computational process. Thus, our results do not support the idea of a mental movement toward the solution during arithmetic but indicate a semantic association between operation and space.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 426 
KW  - mental arithmetic
KW  - eye movements
KW  - mental number line
KW  - operational momentum
KW  - embodied cognition
KW  - grounded cognition
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-406504
IS  - 426
ER  -